


Wrong Choice

by Severnlight



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, The ultimate of a bad day, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:28:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27921529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Severnlight/pseuds/Severnlight
Summary: Shortly after Mustafar, the time for reckoning has come for our hero, as he revisits his choices strapped to one cold durasteel surgical table.The prompt for this work was "Wrong Choice".
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Darth Vader, Padmé Amidala/Darth Vader
Comments: 20
Kudos: 46





	Wrong Choice

Pain. The only feeling the man on the durasteel table had left. One last persistent, vicious thread still tying him to the world.

The droids in the sterile, brightly lit surgery room were wrapping up their handiwork with brutal efficiency, ignoring his screams like they had for the past few hours. He was immobilized. His limbs - gone, replaced with prosthetics drilled into the stubs of his remaining bones, neural interfaces forcefully grafted to his raw nerves. Their metal fingers had peeled the shreds of clothing from his charred skin, and inserted medical devices in his chest, his throat, his skull. He was awake through it all, his soul still on fire, writhing in silent agony.

The bright lights hurt his eyes, but he couldn’t remember how to close his eyelids. If he had any left. The next device was placed in his ears, and after a moment of startling pressure on his ruined eardrums, he was able to hear again. A hiss, growing louder, caught his attention from above. He saw a mask with red-tinted eye lenses, slowly descending over the plane of his face. Fine needles protruded from its edges. He guessed they would drill directly into the neural circuits the droids had inserted in key locations throughout his skull.

He tried to move away, but his restraints held him tight. The man cried. If he could simply vanish… If he could simply die. Destiny - he choked at the raw tightness in his throat - was a cruel mistress. She would grant him a form of death, yes, but it was neither merciful nor literal. It came for him embodied in that black mask, now closing over his face like a coffin. Why had his foe gone through such trouble to preserve him so?

As the mask fell in around his face, a choked moan barely escaped his lips. With a cold snap-hiss, the closing mechanism entombed him within his hellish mindscape, claiming his senses, hermetically isolating him from the world. From any shred of hope.

He could hear his own breathing now - loud, mechanical, regulated by a machine. Haunting. The effects of a pain-killer and a cocktail of regenerative drugs spread through what remained of his body. The pain dulled, just enough to make him fully lucent as to what was happening to him.

Suddenly, the surgical table he was restrained on rotated to raise him up. Through his new eye lenses, which enhanced low-light vision and tinted the world red, he was able to make out the familiar shape of a hooded being, standing tall in the darkest corner of the room. A man he used to love. A man he no longer recognized.

“ _Master_ ,” began the figure, yellow eyes piercing through Obi-Wan’s haze of a reckoning. He shivered. The cold sarcasm in Anakin’s voice cut through him worse than the scalpels wielded by the surgical droids. “Can you hear me?”

Obi-Wan refused to speak. His own breathing, a loud cascade of sounds so foreign and machine-like, constricted his throat, but the tears never came.

Anakin — no, this was no longer Anakin —Darth Vader sighed, and pulled the hood off of his face.

“You have two choices, Obi-Wan. You can make your life into an even greater nightmare than it already is. Or, you can live without antagonizing me.”

Obi-Wan did not care for any of these choices. His memories drifted helplessly to that last crucial choice he’d had to make in his life, and he’d failed so miserably on.  
  


* * *

** Eighteen hours earlier **

“It’s over, Anakin!” Obi-Wan warned, and raised his lightsaber, “I have the high ground!”

His padawan, his best friend, now a corrupted remnant of a human being, glared at him with pure hatred from a floating platform over the hissing lava river.

“You underestimate my power!” He yelled back viciously, and jumped without hesitation to attack. Obi-Wan saw the opening for a perfect mou kei as Anakin flipped over him in an aggressively overconfident maneuver. In fact, he had several opportunities to strike and end the duel, but he hesitated. The image of a grinning, blue-eyed boy, swam before his eyes again. He couldn’t kill him. Anakin landed on high ground behind him, and before Obi-Wan could snap back from the memory, his foe’s lightsaber burned through his sword arm, then his legs, in a flash of a single swing. The Jedi Master fell, not understanding what hit him. He couldn’t recognize the sound of his own scream.

The Force hummed dark all around him, drunk on the Sith Lord’s victory.

“You were like a brother to me, Obi-Wan,” Anakin hissed, looming over him with these hateful yellow eyes, saber still lit. “I respected you. I loved you.”

Obi-Wan desperately tried to claw up on the bank with his remaining hand, but the incline was too steep. His gaze bore into Anakin’s, tears staining his ashen face.

“How could you, Anakin…” he choked on the words, and the smoke, and the heat, “You were meant to bring balance…” the sharp gravel burned his fingers as he clawed forward, “not this… not this…” He looked up at what the grinning blue-eyed boy had turned into, and sobbed.

Anakin’s frown deepened. Obi-Wan hoped that he would take mercy and end him, but his padawan just leaned down to pick up his fallen foe's lightsaber.

“I make my own destiny, _Master_.”

Then, the flames crept up Obi-Wan’s legs and back, and his memories failed him.

* * *

  
Before the maimed Jedi could plan for ways to end his forced existence, he wished to know one last thing, so he leaned forward as far as he could from his restraints, and tried to speak:

“Padmé… is she safe?”

The deep modulation of his voice, evidently produced by a vocoder in the mask, shocked him. Vader’s eyes flashed a warning, but he responded in a slow and deliberate tone:

“Empress Amidala had a difficult labor, but she is recovering well. Do pay heed on how you address her in the future.”

Obi-Wan gulped, his eyes wide with horror.

“… Empress?”

Vader gave him a cold glare, then his features twisted in disgust.

“What, did you think…?! Palpatine is dead!”

Obi-Wan stared at his former padawan through his red-tinted lenses, trying to come to grips with the news.

“You… you fashioned yourself Emperor?”

The Sith Lord’s lips curled in a confident smile.

“I hear the proper title is “Your Majesty”.

“And…Padmé chose to agree with this?”

Vader’s smirk vanished.

“You know, Obi-Wan — after defeating my short-lived Sith Master, I was overcome with a sudden realization. True power lies in the ability to give or take away others’ choices.”

Obi-Wan tried to lick his dry lips.

“Given the alternative, my wife chose to remain with our children, and have some say in their future. As well as the future of our Empire.”

Twins… Padmé had given birth to twins! Powerful twins for their father to twist and corrupt in his image. Obi-Wan’s dread rang through the Force.

“She believed there is still good in you…” he whispered, any last hopes of his crushed.

“And you believed I am the Chosen One. We saw how well that worked out for you.”

Vader took a few steps forward to examine the suit Obi-Wan was sealed in more closely.

“One more thing.” He added, looming leisurely over the mask. “Do not dwell on plans to end your life. The Empire needs you. Should you choose to be stubborn, I will incinerate your home planet, and plant a memorial tablet for you in the debris —one so prominent that your name will be visible from five parsecs.”

Obi-Wan balled his prosthetic fist and something in the room creaked. Vader raised an eyebrow, and without waiting for a response, turned and walked towards the exit. He stopped and hesitated by the door, his glowing eyes turning on Obi-Wan again.

“You were the one who drew a lightsaber on me first, Obi-Wan. Now, you get to live with the consequences. And if you are so worried about the future of my children, perhaps you will choose to remain close to them. Spread some of that famed Jedi influence, as much as you can.”

A team of doctors and another set of medical droids invaded the room. Vader turned his attention on them, voice ice-cold and filled with disdain:

“Make sure he lives. I mean it.”

“Certainly, Your Majesty.” The senior doctor bowed, and his team descended upon Obi-Wan like a wake of vultures. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my dear friends who encouraged me and inspired me to write this - you know who you are!  
> For all the sprints, too! XD ♥️🖤♥️


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